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UPON COMBING HER HAIR.

Breaking from under that thy cloudy veil,

Open and shine yet more, shine out more clear, Thou glorious, golden beam of darling hair, Even till my wonder-stricken senses fail.

Shine out in light, and shine those rays on far,

Thou much more fair than is the Queen of Love When she doth comb her on her sphere above, And from a planet turns a blazing star.

Nay, thou art greater too, more destiny

Depends on thee, than on her influence; No hair thy fatal hand doth now dispense But to some one a thread of life must be.

While gracious unto me, thou both dost sunder
Those glories which, if they united were,

Might have amazed sense, and shew'st each hair
Which if alone had been too great a wonder.

But stay, methinks new beauties do arise

While she withdraws these glories which were spread; Wonder of beauties, set thy radiant head,

And strike out day from thy yet fairer eyes.

SANDYS, HERBERT, CRASHAW,

VAUGHAN.

[GEORGE SANDYS, son of Archbishop Sandys, was born 1577, and died 1643. Set out for the East 1616. Published translation of Ovid 1626; the Psalms 1636; other paraphrases 1638 and 1641.]

[GEORGE HERBERT, born 1592-3, died 1634. He was Public Orator at Cambridge from 1619 to 1627, and was Rector of Bemerton in Wiltshire in 1631. His poems were first published 1633.]

[RICHARD CRASHAW, born 1615 (?); expelled from Cambridge 1644; became a Roman Catholic. Published Steps to the Altar 1646, and died canon of Loretto 1650.]

[HENRY VAUGHAN, born 1621-2, died 1695. Published Secular Poems 1646; Olor Iscanus 1651; Silex Scintillans, part 1, 1650, part 2, 1656; Thalia Rediviva 1678.]

Poets are never independent of circumstances: Sandys, the only one of the four whose names stand at the head of this section who escaped the epidemic of conceits which ran its course in the first half of the seventeenth century, was the only one who had a full and successful life. He too was the only one who could write smooth, clear and vigorous verse, an accomplishment which requires perfect self-possession, or overmastering inspiration, or good models. Sandys wrote before Waller and Denham as well as the average versifiers who came after Dryden. His classical translations are not equal to his scriptural paraphrases, and if he had finished the Æneid Dryden would have left it alone. Like Dryden he did his best work late he was fifty-nine when he published the Psalms. It does not do to compare Sandys with the authorised version of the Bible. Wherever the original is peculiarly striking he is disappointing: he gives his reader no

such compensation for his temerity as Sternhold's version of the Theophany in the 18th Psalm or the close of the 24th, or as Watts's equally well-known paraphrase of the 90th. Even Tate and Brady at their best, as in the 139th Psalm, come very near to Sandys' highest level; but he is much more equable; he never subsides, like Sternhold and Hopkins, into doggerel; he never subsides, like Tate and Brady, into diffuse platitudes. He always grasps the meaning for himself; he seems to work, if not always from the Hebrew, from an ancient version, and he sometimes exhibits a really masterly power of condensation, as in the 119th and the 150th Psalms. Apart from the strictly relative praise due to the versification, the paraphrase on Job is appallingly tame.

The sacred poetry of Sandys was the dignified amusement of the evening of a successful life, whose morn had been spent in eastern travel and in colonial enterprise, without a trace of the internal struggles which form the staple of the poetry of Herbert. The Temple is the enigmatical history of a difficult resignation ; it is full of the author's baffled ambition and his distress, now at the want of a sphere for his energies, now at the fluctuations of spirit, the ebb and flow of intellectual activity, natural to a temperament as frail as it was eager. There is something a little feverish and disproportioned in his passionate heart-searchings. The facts of the case lie in a nutshell. Herbert was a younger son of a large family; he lost his father early, and his mother, a devout, tender, imperious woman, decided, partly out of piety and partly out of distrust of his power to make his own way in the world, that he should be provided for in the Church. When he was twenty-six he was appointed Public Orator at Cambridge, and hoped to make this position a stepping-stone to employment at court. After eight years his patrons and his mother were dead, and he made up his mind to settle down with a wife on the living of Bemerton, where he died after a short but memorable incumbency of three years. The flower of his poetry seems to belong to the two years of acute crisis which preceded his installation at Bemerton or to the Indian summer of content when he imagined that his failure as a courtier was a prelude to his success in the higher character of a country parson. The well-known poem on Sunday, which he sang to his lute so near the end, and the quaint poem on the ideal priest, which we extract, may date from Bemerton. The Quip and The Collar may date from the years of crisis. Still, much, like the poems on

VOL. II.

Employment, of which we insert a specimen, dates from the years of hopeful ambition. There are no traces of consecration or defeat in the Church Porch, where Herbert, like a precocious Polonius, frames a rule of life for himself and other pious courtiers. Herbert, who had thought much of national destiny, and decided that religion and true prosperity were to take flight for America, considered that England was 'full of sin, but most of sloth.'

The plain truth is, that after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the submission of the chieftains of Ulster, and the tardy pacification of the Netherlands, the English gentry were for the first time since the Field of the Cloth of Gold without a rational object of public concern. Poets were left for the first time to feed idly on their own fancies and feelings: that all kinds of enterprise were feasible, as Herbert repeatedly urged, was of little avail in the absence of motive power. The excitement without impulse which characterises Herbert is the explanation of the old criticism that he has enthusiasm without sublimity.' He was, it may be, too fastidious to have succeeded in the best of times. The ascetic temper shows early

'Look on meat, think it dirt, then eat a bit,
And say withal-"earth to earth I commit";"

and more pleasantly—

'Welcome dear feast of Lent. Who loves not thee
He loves not temperance or authority.

Beside the cleanness of sweet abstinence

Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
A face not fearing light.'

He thinks thrift and cleanness go well together, and likes strictness and method for their own sake. The worldling's false pride in licence offends him from the first. There is more self-complacency than penitence in a poem like The Size. From the first he is preoccupied with the thought of death, and hungers for eternity. Only at first the feeling is that he holds of God for two lives, and hopes to make improvement in both: it is affliction that convinces him that he must sacrifice everything in the present life. To the last his piety lacks wings: he is always tormenting himself that he does not love as he should; his fastidious imagination cannot stop short of the highest good, and then he finds that the imagination cannot carry the affections with it in its flight. He tries vainly

to chide and argue himself into fervour : when the mood of fanciful exaltation becomes unattainable he trembles under a sense of deserved displeasure: he feels the pathos of his own ingratitude more keenly than he feels the majesty or the generosity of the Being he is trying to love. He is far too ingenious for the contagious passion of the great mystics: he moves us most when he subsides into meek wistful yearning, and then he is more interesting for himself than for his subject.

The intellectual interest is decidedly stronger in him than in two writers who in a sense belong to his school. Crashaw looks up to him as Faber looked up to Keble. Vaughan was still more strongly and directly influenced by him. Crashaw cannot be said to imitate Herbert, he only is encouraged by the example of a distinguished Cambridge man who had achieved a court and academical reputation as a sacred poet; Vaughan on the contrary is converted by Herbert, and, as we shall see, imitates him copiously. Either of them is perhaps more musically pious by nature than Herbert at their best either excels him: Vaughan's clear intensity and Crashaw's glowing impetuosity alike make the laboured crabbed ingenuity of Herbert seem tame. And yet Herbert has always kept a larger place as a poet in the eyes of the public than Crashaw or Vaughan he owes much of course to Walton's charming life, much to his own Country Parson, but after all The Temple is a book in a sense that Steps to the Temple or Silex Scintillans are not. The Williams MS. proves that Herbert corrected himself more severely in MS. than Vaughan in print, for the only change on the second edition of Silex Scintillans is the removal of a few crude naïvetés from one poem. Even Herbert tolerates much in style and metre that we wish away. Crashaw is smoother because more fluent, but Herbert's poems have always a plan and substance, which those of his successors often lack. Crashaw is full of diffuseness and repetition; in the Wishes for his Mistress he puts in every fantastic way possible the hope that she will not paint; often the variations are so insignificant that he can hardly have read the poem through before sending it to press. As Pope observed, he wrote like a gentleman for his own amusement, and he wrote most at his ease when he was paraphrasing. Marino is his master, while Herbert is his patron and example; but though Marino was the Coryphaeus of that literature of conceits which travelled over Europe, his poem on the Massacre of the Innocents is continually surpassed by Crashaw, who always

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